Introduction

Does the Book of Revelation predict the end of the world? The book has been used repeatedly over the years and centuries to predict (and in some cases, re-predict) the end of the world. Yet here we still are. Maybe the problem is not that doomsday-readers of Revelation get this or that detail wrong (and so miscaluculate the date) but that book was never meant to be a blueprint for what would happen in our future. In this episode we look at how historians understand the book as a "revelation" meant for its own time, not as guidepost for what lies ahead of us now, 2000 years later.